Wednesday, December 30, 2009

When I first arrived in Geneva, one of our clients was Baboo airlines. About a month into the job, their holding company forced them to consolidate agencies and vendors, and the account was sent to Saatchi & Saatchi, here in town.

These are a couple of the current billboards. I rather like them.

I think they do exactly what EasyJet's ads do. But in a different way. They're clearly branded - you know from across the street you're looking at a Baboo ad even before you read it. And they're a simple, interesting way of saying, "Fly to [fill in the blank] for cheap."

Thursday, December 24, 2009

I have an awesome recipe for gingerbread waffles with blueberry syrup. I used to make it every Thanksgiving and Christmas morning. But since moving to Geneva, we've had the waffle iron in storage.

After our 18-month waffle fast, I pulled out the iron for some regular waffles. Not sure what the voltage is, but it burnt out the 500-watt transformer I had it connected to after only a couple waffles.

So I had to hook it up to the 1000-watt transformer our computer is hooked up to.

Not sure I'm going to be making waffles anytime soon unless I can find a Euro-iron.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

My friend, Chantal, recently did a post on her favorite European Christmas markets. It reminded me of the one in Chicago's Daley Plaza, which is always really nice. I used to love to stop for a bag of roasted almonds on my way to the train station, and walk by the window displays at Marshall Field's.

Geneva's Christmas Market, however, is surprisingly and profoundly lame. I don't have any pictures of Chicago's with me. But I do have some of Vienna's, which I recently visited on business. Here's a head-to-head comparison.

Christmas decorations on Geneva's main pedestrian mall...

Christmas decorations on Vienna's main pedestrian mall...

Advantage: Vienna.

Vienna had at least three Christmas markets, and I've only found one in Geneva. So I'll compare Geneva's with Vienna's lamest one.

The lamest Christmas market in Vienna was in the Museum Quarter. It featured a three-man brass band playing "Hark! The Hearal Angels Sing," booths full of wood-carved ornaments, and chocolate-dipped pretzels.

The Christmas market in Geneva is on the way to the train station. It features 80% African tribal tsotchkes, and smells so much like burning incense I have flashbacks from the University of Utah student center.

Advantage: Vienna.

Don't get me wrong, being within site of Mont Blanc is a fantastic setting for the holidays. I'm just not convinced the Genevoix do their markets right. Maybe they're just too tired after Escalade.

I find it interesting that the larger the denomination, the larger the bill. The largest barely fit in my wallet.

I find it even more interesting that the Swiss have a 1000 franc bill - the equivalent of having a $1000 bill. Maybe it's designed not to fit into a standard wallet as a reminder that most people shouldn't be walking around with 1000 franc bills to begin with.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

What this means is that my December paycheck is twice the amount of my usual monthly income.

Most people use this money to pay their taxes in the coming months. But since I've been in the country less than three years, I'm already taxed at source (i.e., taxes are taken out of each paycheck, just like it always was in the U.S.).

So this is my second December with a doubled paycheck. Merry Christmas.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

In Chicago, we had awesome producers. And I took them for granted, they were so good. Anything we needed, they'd find a way to come through. In Geneva, we have no producers, so I end up doing the production work when necessary.

We currently have a US-based client, who wants to conduct interviews around the globe for a corporate video. They want to do an interview in Stuttgart, Germany, and asked me to find someone who could film it.

1st attempt: Gauged the distance between Stuttgart and Geneva on Google Maps to see if was something I could do myself. But the client won't pay for me to make the 5-hour drive.

2nd attempt: Contacted our office in Frankfurt to see if they had any recommendations. They don't.

3rd attempt: Googled "videographer Stuttgart." The top hit is for videographers in Stuttgart, Arkansas. I realized this isn't going to work.

4th attempt: Contacted a producer in England to see if he knew anyone. He put me in contact with the Deutsch Film Commission. I found a list of 27 cameramen and carpet bombed them all with emails. I have spent the rest of the day answering emails and taking quotes from German cameramen who are asking questions about studio booking, camera angles, wardrobe and make-up, when I just need someone with a guy who does weddings to show up with his Sony digicam and a light kit. In the end, we got someone at a decent price.

Friday, December 18, 2009

A couple weekends ago was Escalade - a Geneva holiday. Not a Swiss one. Just for the people in Geneva. While the name may lead you to think it's the day the Genevoix celebrate full-size luxury sport utility vehicles, it's actually a little more interesting. In a nutshell:

In the middle of the night on December 11, 1602, the French mounted a surprise attack on the city-state of Geneva, hoping to plunder its wealth.

According to legend, as the French were climbing the walls of the city (escalade means to go up a ladder), a woman who lived above the town gate was up late preparing vegetable soup when she looked out her window and saw the troops approaching in the darkness. Not knowing what else to do, she dumped the scalding soup and the cauldron on them. The ensuing commotion woke the rest of the city, and with men called to arms, the invasion was unsuccessful.

In short, the French were beaten by a bowl of soup. They just can't win, the French.

Today, Escalade is celebrated by serving...wait for it...vegetable soup. But go anywhere in the city, and you can buy various sizes of chocolate cauldrons, which are filled with marzipan vegetables. The night of Escalade, the oldest person and the youngest person in the house each take a spoon and say in French, "So perish the enemies of the Republic!" and then smash the cauldron. (Kind of makes me wish we had something patriotic to shout before biting off the head of a chocolate Easter Bunny.)

Escalade has also become a bit of a costume party. Kind of a Swiss Halloween with kids and even teens wearing costumes to school and parties. Not sure what dressing up as Spiderman has to do with a 1602 foiled invasion, but, whatever.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

I see this guy around our neighborhood all the time. He's such a fixture, I had to take this stealth shot of him when I was behind him at the grocery store.

He only has two outfits that I know of:

In the summer, he wears shorts, a yellow t-shirt, and carries a fishing pole and a bucket of bait. (Not sure where his fishing hole is, but he takes the bus to it.)

In the winter, he wears this purple and pink coat - sometimes with a fishing vest over it. If the weather is warm, he pushes the sleeves of this big, puffy coat up to his elbows like an eskimo in a John Hughes party movie.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Years ago, I went to an outdoor Dave Matthews concert. It was ear-ringingly loud. I was talking to my friend Brooke during one of the songs when a woman in front of us turned to shush us. I was a little stunned, but Brooke just looked at her and said, "Sorry. I didn't know we were in a library!"

Sometimes I feel like that at my office. The American agencies I've worked for are much louder. Or at least, less hostile towards volume.

Why didn't Switzerland take part in World War II? Was it because they were “neutral?” That’s a question I’d had in the back of my mind for quite a while, so I decided to look it up.

Switzerland's current neutrality kept them from entering World War II. But it had nothing to do with Germany not invading it. Honestly, would Hitler have said, “Well, it wouldn’t be fair to occupy a neutral country.”

Hilter had plans to annex Switzerland as soon as the Germans occupied the rest of Europe. German propaganda at the time declared Die Schweiz, das kleine Stachelschwein, nehmen wir auf dem Rückweg ein or "We'll take Switzerland, the small porcupine, on our way back home!"

But there were three reasons the Germans never invaded Switzerland (oversimplified here, of course):

The Swiss were overwhelmingly anti-Nazi. Their democracy was too conservative to accept a single-Führer regime. And Hilter hadn’t bombarded them with propaganda as he had Germany and Austria. Invading Switzerland would lead to massive civil disobedience. So the Nazis would have had to use more force than they did in other German-speaking countries. And that force was being diverted towards France and Russia.

The Swiss were better prepared militarily than its occupied neighbors. While German tanks could have rolled easily into Bern, a contingency plan had the Swiss Army fighting with guerilla tactics from the Alps, which was more than the French or Belgians had planned. So invasion was postponed.

The railways that ran through the Swiss Alps connected Hilter's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. Germany knew an attack on Switzerland would lead to the Swiss Army dismantling the railways, paralyzing trade indefinitely.

If the Nazis had attacked Switzerland, it would have been a short battle – even all of these together wouldn’t have been enough to keep the Nazi agenda at bay. But together they were enough to encourage them to postpone their invasion plans.

So it's not that Germany respected Switzerland's neutrality. The Swiss were just very lucky.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

A couple weeks ago, Swiss voters helped bring about a constitutional ban on building minarets in Switzerland. So apparently religious freedom isn't covered by "neutrality."

A couple days ago the UDC representative who initiated the anti-minaret movement debated a member of Hamas on Al Jazeera. I wasn't able to watch, and I haven't been able to find a transcript. But I've got to imagine there are some gems in that debate.

While the Swiss I've spoken with are disgusted with the motion, a few are even morespooked by the idea that the new law and the recent debate will turn terrorist eyes onto Switzerland. One of the people I spoke to asserted that Geneva would be the most likely target because, as he put it, "Geneva is the heart of Switzerland."

In my mind, a more accurate geographic metaphor would be the "cowlick" or "skin tag of Switzerland." So I asked why not Bern, since it was the the capital where the law was passed. Or Zurich, because they have a nicer airport. But he was adamant - Geneva is the most likely target for a terrorist attack because it is "the heart of Switzerland."

The comment reminded me of two women I heard interviewed on NPR in the months after the 9/11 terrorist attack. They were from the Champaign-Urbana area of Illinois. When the interviewer asked them how the attacks on New York and D.C. affected them, they expressed concern that they might be next. "We're so close to the University of Illinois," they said. "And that could easily be a target."

I also remember receiving forwarded emails from friends in Salt Lake, convinced that al Qaeda's next target was the bobsled run for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

I remember as a kid thinking that a city had really come into its own when it got its own Hard Rock Cafe. A few years ago it was having a Frank Gehry building. Now, in a kind of perverse way, it's finding reasons radical jihadis should bomb you.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Yesterday, with a home full of sick kids, we turned on the TV, and I decided to introduce the kids to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We put in the DVD of the George C. Scott version – which I had never seen – and sat down for a couple hours of edifying holiday mirth and merriment.

We ended up with kids who were too afraid to sleep alone, plagued by visions of Jacob Morley.